The claims made by the study don’t really seem to hold up when you look at the methodology, because there’s just not enough data collected to make a definitive statement, of any sort.

The study worked like this: 28 young men between 18 and 29 were selected for the study due to their minimal gaming in their past history. They were given an MRI, and then 14 were issued a laptop with “a shooting video game”, with instructions to play it for ten hours over a week, and half weren’t. Then MRIs were administered at one and two weeks, after the “gamers” had stopped playing. The MRI tests used Stroop tasks to determine functioning of these two areas.

Every single part of that frankly rings alarm bells. Why were no women involved? Why only 18 to 29 year olds? How were their “minimal gaming” pasts determined? What video game were they assigned to play? Was it a commercial product, a game designed by academics for other reasons, or one engineered for the study?

One thing that stands out: why were Stroop tests administered? At the very least, they must be aware that the theory that the ACC was shown to perhaps be tied to emotional control because of films shown to the subjects, not Stroop tests. “Emotional” Stroop tests do exist, but it seems an unusual choice.

But here’s the key thing: their behavior wasn’t tracked and no relevant medical data was taken. There wasn’t even any self-reporting, as far as we can determine from released materials.

That’s a huge problem. If you’re going to say there are possible behavioral changes, you really should, you know, demonstrate changes in behavior.

Here’s what really stands out: we can’t find anybody who actually runs this place. The closest we can get is a profile of it as a charity. It seems to collect about $500,000 every year…but from who? There’s no “donation” link anywhere on the site, no treasurer identified, nothing. We couldn’t find any financial reports. Heck, the privacy policy on the site isn’t even a link.

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Interesting use of research on the Stroop test, and you’re absolutely right: there are parts of the brain where activation seems to be related to “conflicting information”, but nobody really knows (yet) exactly what it means. Some people, a while back, even theorized this information could be used for “lie detection” … but that fell through, as well, for exactly the reasons you’re talking about: it’s almost impossible to definitively determine what the signals mean.

There’s also more information about the Stroop test, and some theories about how and why it happens and how it relates to mental processing in general, here: [dimensional-overlap.com] … I definitely recommend it for anyone interested in the topic.